Bidding for Birthday Happiness

It was my birthday, and for the first time in many years, I wasn't able to gather friends around a table, for my favourite dinner of the year. Disconsolate, I sought for ways to revive my spirits, searching high and low on the InterWeb for a suitable birthday present to myself. Nearly everything was discarded, but then I found Langtons. Wine auctions have been taking place for many years, but for various reasons, they never seem to have taken off over the Internet within the UK. This is something that obviously needs to be investigated - I presume there are problems with licensing - and I'll have to go spend good EPSRC money to find out why. In the meantime, Australia seems to be happy to flog second-hand wine, for extermely reasonable prices.

Searching through the lists a few days before the end of the auction is like seeing an oenilogical Christmas list. So many exciting new tastes, for seemingly so little money, with the joy that many of the lots were single bottles. I placed a few bids down on things I wanted to try, and then returned every day to see if the prices had changed, expecting the normal EBay style of last minute bidding and sniping. And there was - I wanted to try one of the big Penfolds wines, a Bin 707 from 1997, so I put in a bid of $69, which went up on the day of sale to $102. However, other wines were obviously less attractive - for instance I got 3 bottles of Tyrrell's Vat 47 Chardonnay 1999 for only $2 more than the initial bid price of $20 ( I should explain, that just like EBay, the site uses proxy bidding, where you enter the maximum value you're prepared to pay for an item, and it will bid up on your behalf. Whilst superficially this should encourage single bidding, for knowedgeable buyers, an optimum strategy ends up being to do last minute bidding see The Timing of Bids in Internet Auctions: Market Design, Bidder Behavior, and Artificial Agents for fuller explanations).

Unfortunately, even though the auction ended on 29 January, I couldn't pick up the wines from their warehouse until the 1 February, so the actual birthday dinner was accompanied by a rather more prosaic 1998 Metala Original Plantings Shiraz - you can see that I'm getting quite blase about commonly available wines now. The Shiraz was pleasant, blackcurrant and coffee, but still rather closed with a short finish.

The Tyrrell's thus emerged with dinner when we entertained Mike Fry and his wife Kate. Mike is the guy I'm working with in Sydney, and great fun it is too. One paper written, with several more to come. We cooked the Endsleigh special of Beetroot Risotto with Parma Ham Quail's Eggs and Horseradish, then Salmon wrapped in Parma with Puy Lentils. Of course, the local supermarkets aren't like Waitrose, and we haven't yet found a posh food delicatessen. There is a gaping hole in Autralian supermarkets for better class of shop than Coles or Woolworths, but more of that another day. Instead, Helen had to travel into Davy Jones for the ingredients, for a day's shopping whilst the children were at school. Life is hard.

Dinner was excellent, with grown up company, with conversations ranging across a wide panoply of subjects - I now have a slightly different perspective on Austrlian politics. The wine, Tyrrell's Vat 47? Well, I destroyed the cork in opening the bottle, so I had to jug and fish out lots of cork bits. The colour was surprisingly dark, very green and oily. The texture matched, with the thick gelatinous feel that comes from good old wines, which coat the entire mouth and stay for several seconds afterwards. The flavours were initially lemon and rather simple in the first taste, but then opened up with sweeter melon flavourings in the more complex later sips. We drank one bottle from the three that I bought - others will come home for drinking in the aniticipated cold of the English Autumn.